What Is the Oldest Tree in the World? Meet Methuselah, Nearly 5,000 Years Old

High in the dry mountains of eastern California, on slopes of bare white rock where little else grows, stand some of the most twisted trees you will ever see. Many look half dead, with bare, polished wood shaped by thousands of years of wind and ice. One of them is the oldest known living tree on Earth.

Methuselah: about 4,850 years old

In 1957 the tree-ring scientist Edmund Schulman took a core from a Great Basin bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva) in the White Mountains. Counting its rings showed it was more than 4,700 years old. Named Methuselah, after the long-lived figure in the Bible, it is now around 4,850 years old according to the OldList database of old trees.

That means Methuselah sprouted roughly around the time the first great pyramids were being built in Egypt. Its exact location in the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest is kept secret to protect it.

The tree that was cut down

There was an even older one. In 1964, a graduate student named Donald Currey was studying ancient glaciers on Wheeler Peak in Nevada. With permission from the US Forest Service, a bristlecone pine was cut down so that its rings could be counted. It had about 4,900 rings, making it the oldest tree then known. The stump of the tree, later nicknamed Prometheus, became a cautionary tale, and the area is now part of Great Basin National Park, where the remaining ancient trees are protected.

In 2017 the database also reported a still-unnamed bristlecone in the White Mountains, sampled in the 1950s, with a reported age of more than 5,000 years, but its details have not been published.

How to count a tree’s age

You do not need to cut a tree down to know its age. Scientists use an increment borer, a hollow drill that extracts a pencil-thin core from the trunk. The small hole does not kill the tree.

In seasonal climates, a tree grows a pale band of wood in spring and summer and a darker, denser band later in the year. Each pair makes one annual ring. But simply counting can be misleading: in very bad years a ring may be missing, and sometimes a tree forms two rings in one year. So scientists use cross-dating, matching the distinctive pattern of wide and narrow rings, caused by wet and dry years, between many trees in the same area. That lets them catch errors and assign each ring to an exact calendar year.

Bristlecone pine rings have been joined into a continuous record going back almost 9,000 years, using dead wood lying on the ground. The record was even used to check and calibrate radiocarbon dating.

Why bristlecones live so long

It seems strange that the oldest trees grow in some of the harshest places. But that may be the point:

• Slow growth makes very dense, resinous wood that resists rot, insects and fungi.
• In the dry, cold air, dead wood decays extremely slowly.
• Old trees often keep only a narrow strip of living bark, feeding a few branches. If part of the tree dies, the rest can carry on.
• Few other plants grow there, so there is little competition and little fuel for fires.

What about older clones?

Some plants are far older as clones. A Norway spruce in Sweden, nicknamed Old Tjikko, has a root system that radiocarbon dating suggests is around 9,500 years old, though its current trunk is much younger. Pando, a grove of quaking aspen in Utah, is a single organism connected by roots and may be thousands of years old. Because no single trunk is that old, scientists usually list clones separately from individual trees like Methuselah.

In short

• The oldest known living individual tree is Methuselah, a bristlecone pine about 4,850 years old.
• Prometheus, about 4,900 years old, was cut down in Nevada in 1964.
• Tree ages are found by taking a core and cross-dating the rings.
• Bristlecone ring records stretch back nearly 9,000 years.
• Slow growth, dense wood and harsh, dry conditions help bristlecones live so long.
• Some clonal plants, such as Old Tjikko and Pando, have even older root systems.